James H. Sweet
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Wisconsin

Jim Sweet grew up in Charlotte, NC, and completed his BA and MA at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  He received his PhD in 1999 from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.  Before coming to Wisconsin, he taught for four years at Florida International University in Miami, and for one year at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.  His research and teaching interests focus on Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic diaspora.  He has published on a variety of topics related to the African diaspora, including race, religion, kinship, and sexuality.  Sweet’s book, Recreating Africa, was the winner of the 2005 Wesley Logan Prize for the best book on the history of the African diaspora, awarded by the American Historical Association.  The book was also a finalist for the 2004 Frederick Douglass Prize.  His current research project is an examination of the eighteenth-century Portuguese-Atlantic world as seen through the lens of an enslaved, and then freed, man who traveled from Benin, to Brazil, and finally to Portugal.  In addition to his diaspora interests, Sweet has traveled to southern Africa on a yearly basis since 1994.  Originally, these trips were merely to visit his wife’s family and friends in South Africa, but in recent years they have become “working vacations,” as Sweet has begun several research projects and collaborative partnerships in South Africa.